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Rise of Legends (as opposed to Rise of Nations) plays on a much smaller scale, the maps aren't random, there are three very different factions, cities are founded only in specific locations and developed through broad "districts," there are hero units with special abilities that level up, god powers, and combat is heavily reliant on the use of unit powers. It was clearly designed as "Rise of Nations has a baby with Warcraft 3" and it succeeds very well. It also has one of the best RTS interfaces ever (winners are Ruse and Sins of a Solar Empire). It's a great game.

I think that, in particular, RTS failed to evolve the interface. Since the original Command&Conquer, we have an interface where you select a rectangle of units by drag&drop and attack a single target with it. It's just not suitable for anything else. Having a group of tanks focus on a single vehicle or a building is rarely useful in a game of numbers. It should be the special case, but the interface makes it the default action.

There are commands like attackmove, but they're woefully insufficient. It's basically saying "go there and atack targets in the general area". You still have very limited control over what's happening. Snipers will be shooting at tanks, missile launchers at isolated infantrymen, etc. SC2 calls this "feature" and expects you to click like crazy to fix that.

It could be better if combat was a little slower, but in Starcraft everyone plays on "Fastest" game speed.

That's why I like Harvest: Massive Encounter very much. It's a (quite deep) tower defense game, but with many interesting innovations like resource collecting and building power lines. It gets close to a proper RTS game. Anyway, in the game you have priority settings for every type of turret. You can make type A turret pick targets in a specific order, or even ignore some targets completely ! Can any other RTS game do that ?

I'm looking forward to Heart of the Swarm for my next dose of traditional RTS. Small scale/hero based games seem to be quite well covered at the moment, from CoH2 to DOTA2/LoL etc. Space is covered by Sins of a Solar Empire. It's quite hard to pick segments that aren't that well covered - I suppose the epic scale battles from TA/SupCom are lacking a little, but there was only one chap who did them in the past and it was the same chap who did them recently, so it's not like much has changed. Homeworld I miss a lot though - Sins needs a story!

There are commands like attackmove, but they're woefully insufficient. It's basically saying "go there and atack targets in the general area". You still have very limited control over what's happening. Snipers will be shooting at tanks, missile launchers at isolated infantrymen, etc. SC2 calls this "feature" and expects you to click like crazy to fix that.

That's not always true. Units that can shoot air will shoot air before ground, siege tanks will focus banelings instead of zerglings. Also your units won't attack buildings if they can attack something else, and they switch targets intelligently.

Well, you could obviously take unit AI further. Have templars automatically storm in an optimal fashion, have marines scatter from banelings, stalkers blink to the back row when hurt, etc. The game wouldn't be as responsive, fun, varied, or intense then, but it's certainly something you could pursue (assuming you'd compensate with other stuff). SC chooses this particular spot on the scale, and I'm fine with that. I'm glad other sorts of games exist as well, of course. It's just when people go "no, you shouldn't be able to have fun this way" that ticks me off a bit.

What if I want to tweak AI on the fly ? If I want to tell my tanks to prioritize X or forget about X ? No way. I have to do it all manually. I don't want everything done automatically for me, I want an ability to change focus within a group of units. And I don't mean in Blizzard sense "everything attacks the same target".

Also, since the darkest ages Blizzard RTS games have been retarded in unit movement deparment. They have no facing direction, no inertia, no concept of flanking or anything. They're blobs of HP with damage, speed and range. Unit model is very boring compared to even something like first C&C, they make up for that with activated abilities and convoluted damage/armor relationships.
(For the uninitiated, C&C was in some parts very advanced for its time. It had fully 3D vehicles made out of voxels.)

Early C&C games had 'x' key, which would scatter units and make them somewhat more resistant to being squished by tanks. It was far from effective, but at least they tried. I want more commands like that. "Surround that building/base and wait", "keep distance from those units", "keep attacking until you're at 30% of max HP, then retreat", "focus fire on 1 unit at a time", "spread fire over multiple units" (This one would be very useful for high damage units like missile launchers). Instead, I have commands in absolute terms - "units at (3, 15) attack units at (26, 63)".

Or something as "basic" as "stay in this formation". RTS games are notoriously bad at keeping formation, and I admit it's a difficult programming problem. That's the part of the bigger picture problem - pathfinding and AI algorithms are very complicated for groups of units. A* doesn't cut it when you have a bunch of units. Supreme Commander and SC2 have moved past that, but SupCom is dull and SC2 looks like it's using soft collisions, which is a workaround more than a fix.

"Taking every possible advantage" means quite the opposite. Everything within the game's rules is fair. I mean, that's what rules are. Also, in this day and age, the game could be easily patched if people were doing things they were not meant to.

There's a reason I don't play MOBAs or fighting games: Because expected action (say, two guys fighting) and displayed action (cheesing, exploiting, animation breaks, limit breaks) turn the games on their heads. It's no longer the spectacle of the action but the sore need to Win At All Costs™, and I play games to relieve stress, not pile it on.

Yeah, yeah, "it's in the rules." Then the rules suck, bucko, and the people who seem to be getting the most enjoyment out of it (when they're not screaming at you for being a faggot noob) are the ones who memorized the arcane tactics involved so they could spend their days beating newbies like they got beat up themselves in high school.

One would think a game should be enjoyable for all parties, but this hyper-competitive nonsense is something I don't want to see the RTS genre devolve into. In fact, I couldn't help but notice that most of the people here tend to feel nostalgic for single-player compstomps. Funny, that.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

Early C&C games had 'x' key, which would scatter units and make them somewhat more resistant to being squished by tanks. It was far from effective, but at least they tried. I want more commands like that. "Surround that building/base and wait", "keep distance from those units", "keep attacking until you're at 30% of max HP, then retreat", "focus fire on 1 unit at a time", "spread fire over multiple units" (This one would be very useful for high damage units like missile launchers). Instead, I have commands in absolute terms - "units at (3, 15) attack units at (26, 63)".

Check out Warzone 2100 and Earth 2150. Both are beautiful in that regard.

Earth has its own scripting language and configurable unit behaviors.

Warzone 2100 not only has commander units that can be used to group units together and give them orders or even call in artillery (!), but features simple controls for attack behavior and retreat orders. They can be set to disengage from combat at a set HP %, go to the nearest repair point, get repaired, and move back. Base defenses can be automated to a degree, including automatic counter-artillery, counter-artillery vtol etc.
It is quite a game and is still being developed. The way Warzone handles indirect fire is absolutely great, with sensor units or towers that can be used to guide artillery units.

What if I want to tweak AI on the fly ? If I want to tell my tanks to prioritize X or forget about X ? No way. I have to do it all manually. I don't want everything done automatically for me, I want an ability to change focus within a group of units. And I don't mean in Blizzard sense "everything attacks the same target".

That's fine as well. If you could write your own, arbitrarily complex AI scripts for everything, and would only need to tweak a bunch of parameters during a match, that'd be fine as well. I'm simply saying that's not what Starcraft ever intended to be. "Look at this apple - it makes for a terrible orange!"

Originally Posted by b0rsuk

no inertia

Inertia is what makes the Banshee's moving shot possible, afaik.
As for unit movement being "boring" - that's intentional, simplicity was their design goal here, "movers and shooters". There are plenty of interesting interactions that arise from this already, given the various unit compositions, positioning, terrain, abilities, etc.
Also, lack of complex movement/facing makes for less stuff to micro. Tanks in CoH are notorious for being hugely micro-intensive, as far as I've heard.

Originally Posted by Nalano

Yeah, yeah, "it's in the rules." Then the rules suck, bucko, and the people who seem to be getting the most enjoyment out of it (when they're not screaming at you for being a faggot noob) are the ones who memorized the arcane tactics involved so they could spend their days beating newbies like they got beat up themselves in high school.

Nothing's stopping you from playing customs or BGH all day long against your bronze-league friends, or whatever. I certainly had fun with Starcraft (or Street Fighter) even when I had no bloody clue as to what I was doing, and also when I tried taking things a bit more seriously. It's not like competitive and casual gameplay are exclusive.

Base defenses can be automated to a degree, including automatic counter-artillery, counter-artillery vtol etc.

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts had automatic counter-battery fire, come to think of it.

Originally Posted by pkt-zer0

Tanks in CoH are notorious for being hugely micro-intensive, as far as I've heard.

Hardly. Fast movers just involve running circles, slow movers just involve backing up with their fronts faced forward. Neither require intense micro as such - especially since you'll never have but so many of them.

Last edited by Nalano; 10-07-2012 at 04:16 PM.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts had automatic counter-battery fire, come to think of it.

Hardly. Fast movers just involve running circles, slow movers just involve backing up with their fronts faced forward. Neither require intense micro as such - especially since you'll never have but so many of them.

In tales of valor they did, but it was a hero unit basically. The tank missions in the German campaign of Tales of Valor were pretty fun.

There's a reason I don't play MOBAs or fighting games: Because expected action (say, two guys fighting) and displayed action (cheesing, exploiting, animation breaks, limit breaks) turn the games on their heads. It's no longer the spectacle of the action but the sore need to Win At All Costs™, and I play games to relieve stress, not pile it on.

Yeah, yeah, "it's in the rules." Then the rules suck, bucko, and the people who seem to be getting the most enjoyment out of it (when they're not screaming at you for being a faggot noob) are the ones who memorized the arcane tactics involved so they could spend their days beating newbies like they got beat up themselves in high school.

One would think a game should be enjoyable for all parties, but this hyper-competitive nonsense is something I don't want to see the RTS genre devolve into. In fact, I couldn't help but notice that most of the people here tend to feel nostalgic for single-player compstomps. Funny, that.

Everything you just said. Everything.

Even when playing amongst friends though we either tank rushed or turtled. We didnt build horrible mico management forces.

You guys should try out dominion mode in League of Legends, it's a much more relaxed kind of atmosphere. The games are a lot shorter (about 15 mins) and it's more just about PVP than farming, laning, metas, etc. It's pretty fun.

Also, since the darkest ages Blizzard RTS games have been retarded in unit movement deparment. They have no facing direction, no inertia, no concept of flanking or anything. They're blobs of HP with damage, speed and range. Unit model is very boring compared to even something like first C&C, they make up for that with activated abilities and convoluted damage/armor relationships.

I think the Blizzard way of handling flanking etc. is quite beautiful. You don't need a bonus for flanking attacks because you can attack with more units. Since space is very limited on most maps, positioning is absolutely key. Ramps are perfect defensive spots because the enemy needs to get range on the high ground before he can attack your units there. SC2 doesn't need strange bonuses which would have to be displayed in the UI somehow, its system is far more elegant. Also SC2 doesn't have many abilities you could activate, it's not really a micro game.

I agree with the rest of your points though, I can't think of any strategy games where you control the strategy of a battle; it's mostly tactics or "take blob and attack X", but no real depth as far as commands go.

I used to be really into the old FPS games and they will always have a place in my heart, so I do feel your pain even if it's been years since I picked up a C&C.
I notice you list the C&C games and things like TA so this is probably a long shot, but have you played Emperor: Battle For Dune? Also known as, That Westwood New Dune Game That Isn't Dune 2000 And Got A Bit Slated For Being Too Old-School. It's probably one of my favourite older strategy games just because of the variation between the sides, the nonlinear campaign map, some epic missions and the neutral factions. On the off-chance you missed it, try to find a copy somewhere.